Islam Through Western Liberal Eyes

Western liberals have a bad habit of “denying agency.” Our self-absorbed knee-jerk tendency to blame all the world’s woes on the evil West is just a way of putting ourselves at the center of every story, for reasons best left unaddressed here.

I’m opposed to drone bombing. I’m opposed to the wars in the ME. I’m opposed to arms deals with the Saudis, and I suggest now is a good moment to get behind Rand Paul and his move to bring the current arms deal to a vote. I’m opposed to an economy built upon the exploitation of the world, and I think we should move immediately to address our real sins: an unethical standard of living which requires oil, fuels wars across the world and has led to global displacement and chaos.

Those are our real sins, and every single person writing here is complicit in them. But let’s get something straight: this cultural relativism is nonsense. Islam has a problem, and it has had a problem since its very inception. It is at war against itself and against whatever people it comes across. It slaughters in the Philippines. It slaughters in India. It slaughters in Myanmar. It slaughters in Nigeria. It slaughters in the Sudan. It has done these things from the beginning, and it is all right there in the Quran, let alone the hadith.

There was a time about ten years ago when I considered becoming Muslim. It is a very attractive image to a certain type of young bleeding heart woman, and I know two others who did convert. You can identify with the scapegoat, with the suffering. Most attractive of all was Sufism. I still am moved by the Sufis.

My boyfriend at the time had a grandfather who was a very liberal, open-minded man. He had spent his career between the Middle East and America, working as an oil executive (and yes, really, he was a passionate Democrat). He was quite tolerant of my many radical left-wing ideas, but he would shake his head when I started talking about Islam.

“Annie,” he’d say. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, read the Quran. Not excerpts. Not summaries. Read the book.” Eventually I did. I read it in a day, reflected for a few minutes in a sort of weird trance, and then re-read it once more straight-away.

I stopped talking about becoming a Muslim after that. There are beautiful things in Islam. The Sufis are incredible. Many Muslims also hold to their own sort of MTD-ism, and accept the religion the way Catholicism in America was often just a home for keeping the immigrant culture together. Social hall religion, you could say.

But I became a Christian because the Gospels really are radically different than anything the world has ever seen. Christianity grew on the blood of martyrs; The Prophet made martyrs. It will not stop with the end of the Caliphate. As long as there are people who read the Quran and take it literally there will be people who go out and perform jihad. This is not like inviting the Irish Catholics into your Protestant country. It is like sending Lenin back into Russia.

As much as possible we should preach Christ. But that doesn’t mean we should pretend Islam is what its naive defenders want it to be. The burning flesh and severed limbs of innocents are there in the heart of it. Yes, “Not All Muslims.” But, a lot. I foresee Islam waging war on the infidel as long as Islam exists. And by all means, let it exist. But let those who would fight back fight back. Let those who would defend their homes and children defend them. Let us arrest and detain anyone with the slightest hint of radicalism, who has been welcomed in another country and is prepared to return that welcome with nails through children’s faces. Let those who are convinced Islam is the religion of peace face their own dependence on violence in the ME. Let them look the Coptic Christians, the Yazidis, Hindus, Christians in Somalia, Pakistan, Nigeria or Sudan, Buddhists, even (especially) other Muslims in the eye after the radically bold sacrifice of having changed their FB avatar.

Please, enough with the self-absorbed platitudes and selective history-making. Islam is not your piece of clay to make in your own image.

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By the way, speaking of terrorist attacks, in Argentina many still remember the bombing of Plaza de Mayo on the 16h of June of 1955, where the civilian crowd in the Plaza de Mayo, next to the President’s mansion, were strafed by airplanes, which dropped 29 bombs on the people there. There were leaving 355 dead and over 600 wounded. Among the dead were the passengers of a bus, and schoolchildren.

The murderous planes had painted on their wings a cross over a V, meaning “Christ is the victor”, referencing the struggle the Church had with Peron.

So do not come to me with that Christianity is like Islam. In theory, maybe. But when it comes to the practice it is distinction without a difference.

And let us not mention the Ustache, good catholics all, that were helped to escape justice by highly placed clerics in the Vatican.

Yeah, Christians are not supposed to do this. But they do anyway. And there is no penalty attached.

Annie is correct about Islam. Her other opinions are just that — opinions — some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t, and are not the point of the article or this discussion.

People who want to talk about times in the history of Islam when it was “more tolerant” have no idea what they’re talking about, and are using their misunderstanding of Muslim history, based on a few articles or a book, for their own purposes. It actually IS possible to know a lot about Islam, but from the way people write about it one would think guesswork is all that’s possible. Yes, there were times when Islam was more advanced than the Christian West, wealthier, had more military might, etc. Much of that was because Islam had conquered other countries and absorbed their lands, their wealth, and their top scholars, artisans, and thinkers. But Islam’s history is one of repeated, violent “reformations” to the tenets of its founder, Muhammed, who was a warlord, and to the teachings of its great imams, who set what Muslim teachings are once and for all. Is it true that Islam “tolerates” Sufis? At times, and in some ways. But it does not tolerate Sufis the way, say, Anglicans tolerate the break-away Methodists. It tolerates them as an error.

Islam is going through another violent reformation right before our eyes, and we may not survive it. Ignore this at your peril. If you think there is some hope with “moderate Islam,” then understand what people who espouse it are up against and do something to help them. Because what they want is something that has never prevailed in Islam, and that the majority of Muslims in the world do not want. Just hoping they all change their minds is not going to help.

Wow. So much I’d like to write about this, but time (and a tiny keyboard) prevent me.

Annie wrote: Please, enough with the self-absorbed platitudes and selective history-making. Islam is not your piece of clay to make in your own image.

By the same token, Christianity isn’t anyone’s piece of clay. To be sure, Rod and many of us condemn making MTD out of the historic Christian faith, in so far as it regards certain very recent developments, such as SSM, abortion, transgenderism, etc.

But there is an implicit type of MTD present in many non-fundamentalist Christians. We smirk at young earth creationism, a global flood, a literal tower of Babel, and other such stories, holding them little better than flat earthism or geocentrism. We dismiss troubling parts of Torah, such as death to apostates, death to adulterers, rapists marrying their victims–while doing some handwaving to either say Moses got it wrong (or someone who wrote in Moses’ name), or that it really doesn’t matter because we live under the New Testament and even if the Triune God ordered such things now, we have different marching orders for the day and it’s all covered by Jesus anyway.

It sounds a lot like special pleading, honestly. The comparatively modern ideas against slavery, equal rights for women, and other such concerns may have even been championed by Christians, but one wonders why it took so very long for the Church to actively campaign for justice in these issues.

And yet, with white-hot righteous indignation, we condemn others who are not as enlightened as us, when not too long ago we believed just like them…and the Church, when it had much greater power, was silent.

Many of us seen to mould Christianity into a type of liberal democratic ideas, and somewhat blythly explain away things contrary in our history and sacred Scripture…and piece by piece, we dismember the theological authority of Scripture because it doesn’t fit in our narrative–even though Jesus Himself appealled again and again to Scripture as authoritative, never saying “Moses was wrong” (even in the midst of His ‘you have heard it said…but I say to you’ He affirmed that not a jot or tittle would pass away).

No…Annie might be right about Islam, but I question if she is applying the same standard to the words of the Second Person of the Trinity who, before His incarnation, was in heaven in full agreement and participation with an order that we feel free to judge as evil or unenlightened. It’s not just saying that Moses was not fully revealing God’s will, it’s an active judgment that what he said was wrong, ignorant, or even evil.

[NFR: “Presented as an authoritative voice on the subject of Islam”? Where do you get that idea? I posted her comment separately because I thought it was provocative and interesting, and wanted to see what the rest of you thought about it. — RD]
You are right, my apologies.

Well, yes, what about them? What about all the instances where people, nations, cultures, institutions, motivated by and infused with and speaking in the name of Christianity have perpetrated horrible atrocities?

Christianity isn’t “just like Islam,” but neither does it come to this discussion with clean hands. And while Islam may be aflame with more militant rhetoric in its scriptures, it isn’t cast in stone that this is the essence of what Islam is or can be.

But I think the comment about the role of the CIA and MI6 in promoting this brand of Islam is more to the point. It seemed like a good way at the time to reduce the influence of communism and Arab national socialism. And in this sense, 9/11 truly was what Rev. Jeremiah Wright called it… “chickens come home to roost.”

Yeah, the bit about the Crusades. Because it was so long ago, it makes the complainer look silly, and gives the impression that the Church has since cleanded its act.

I got banned by a commentator who was talking about the Armenian genocide, as an example of what Islam is like. She called it “the first notorious genocide of the Twentieth Century”. As a history buff I corrected her on two points 1) It was not the first. The depredations in the Congo by Leopold II had begun at the end of tne Nineteenth and were still going on at the turn of the century, and it was the first. And notorious. And alas, the role of the Catholic church them was not an edifying one (insisting that those who attacked what was going on were Catholic haters – sounds familiar?) And that the Croatian Ustache were just as vicious.

And that awful as the Armenian genocide was, and while Islam is guilty of much, the fact is that the genocide was carried out by the Young Turks, a modernizer, westernizer, secularizer, nationalistic movement. In fact, under the islamic Sultan’s rule, the Armenians had lived their lives in relative security. So I am more willing to accuse nationalism of it.

For this I got first mocked and banned.

Lesson. People with agendas do not like historians, because historians know that if you do not get accustomed to irony and paradox you will never understand it.

For the record: I am a British man who currently lives in India, in a city with a large Muslim population. I am not myself a Muslim.

There are lots of different things to say here.

One of the most interesting things about Islam is that, despite its basis in a single book, it has been lived, practised and understood in so many different ways across the centuries. A few comments here have suggested that claims that Islam used to be more tolerant are nonsense; but the reality is that this is not an either/or question.

It cannot be denied that, following its inception, Islam spread rapidly and aggressively, on the back of the Arab conquests. To say that Islam was the cause of this is a bit of a leap; it is far from unknown for previously isolated pockets of peoples and tribes to suddenly explode onto the world stage in a spectacular military fashion (The Romans, The Mongols, The Turks… the list goes on). The tribes of Arabia were united under Islam, of course, whereas the Mongols, say, were united purely by realpolitik. And it is worth noting that Muhammad himself did not take part in any conquest beyond the Arabian peninsula itself.

At any rate, after this initial burst of expansion at the expense of the Roman and Persian empires the conquest largely stopped (barring the later Mughal invasion of India), and Islam spread peacefully to areas such as Indonesia. My view on this is that Islam was certainly a spur for unity amongst the Arabian tribes, and as a religion is certainly more suited to this purpose than Buddhism, Christianity or Hinduism, for example (although there have been no lack of Christian empires, for example) due to its ‘worldly’ nature. But we cannot therefore lay all the blame for the Arab Conquests at the feet of Islam, any more than we lay the blame for the Mongol conquests at the feet of Mongol shamanic religion. The expansion of tribes from the Arabian peninsula was an economic and demographic likelihood, Islam or no Islam. And once an empire forms and begins to expand, it tends to keep on doing so until it is defeated.

Also, a note on the Crusades: I am surprised again and again to see this cited as an example of purely religious aggression. The crusades were launched by the Pope in response to a plea from the Byzantine empire, to help him reclaim his lands from the Arabs. It was, of course, cast as a holy war, but the real incentive was land and empire. See Peter Frankopan on this subject; in fact, his recent book The Silk Roads mentions this episode of history and is eminently worthwhile reading in its own right.

This much aside (and I’m aware that so, so much more could be said – this is just a comment after all!) I guess the real question is: compared to other religions, why does Islam seem so susceptible to violence, oppression and terror? Is it something inherent to the religion, or (as I just argued above with regard to the Arab Conquests) is it something tangential to it? A historical accident?

Well, for one thing, I think that it’s worth saying that Abrahamic religions (Judaism aside) simply are more aggressive than, for example, Eastern religions or folk religions; this is something simply built in. ‘Aggressive’ here doesn’t necessarily mean militarily, but as soon as you have a sense that you alone have the truth and that everyone else needs to be exposed to it in order to be saved, you are bound to see much more of an urge to expand and convert. You could also apply this to modern liberal secularism; it is so assured that it is right and that any other understanding of the world is wrong, that people need to be saved from any other way of living, that it will continue to aggressively proselytise until its resources are spent (if ever).

But does that mean Christianity and Islam are the same? No. And, as other people here have pointed out, this difference lies fundamentally in the difference between the Qu’ran and the Gospels. And, I think, particularly in the fundamentally differing conception of law and politics which can be found in the two.

Islam is, inherently, a religion of law. Many explicit legal procedures, precedents and rulings are laid out in the main body of the text. This legal content is, in accordance with the nature of the Qu’ran itself, set down by Muhammad and dictated directly by God through the angel Gabriel (Jibreel). As such, it is very difficult to amend or question, although it is (in most cases) very open to interpretation. In this, Islam is much like Judaism; both are religions primarily of the law. Because there is an explicit law, set down in the Qu’ran, given by God, it is very difficult for many Muslims to accept laws which are directly in contradiction to those set down in the Qu’ran. Furthermore, although there is a great deal of wiggle room in interpreting that law, there is only so much wiggle room, unless one is willing to go the whole hog and say that those laws were applicable to 7th century Arabia, but not here and now. I will not go into such a heavy theological discussion, but such a position is at the very least going to be difficult for most Muslims to accept, as those laws are the very foundation of their lives.

Christianity (and all I am about to say here could be equally applied to Buddhism and Hinduism), on the other hand, is a rather otherworldly religion. Although Christ refers repeatedly to the scriptures and the laws of the Torah, it is clear that his interpretation of them is loose (the sabbath, for example), which suggests ours should be as well. He explicitly tells his followers to live in accordance with the law of the land (give Caesar what is his), rather than attempting to make their own religious creed the foundation of the law. In fact, the Gospels have no clear formulation of law, and instead present a personal moral and spiritual code. When Christians finally did get hold of the state apparatus of Rome, they largely maintained and adopted the existing Roman law, which eventually became the foundation for the legal systems of Europe. However, it is clear that those laws were never in direct contravention of the moral framework of Christianity; that situation is only now beginning to occur in the West, and how it will play out is uncertain. But certainly Christianity is more comfortable with not holding the levers of power, with accepting law as a human invention which may stray or come closer to the will of God, but will always be imperfect. Islam, on the other hand, always holds out that possibility of a perfect law, a Godly state, a realisation, almost, of heaven on earth. In this it is rather like Communism; not all followers of the creed may think this way (indeed, there is much in the Qu’ran which can be easily used to confound the arguments of terrorists) but that the temptation is always there. And in response to difficult situations, the utopians will always be waiting in the wings to recruit people to the cause.

As Annie says, we cannot put all the blame for the problems of Islam on the West. At the same time, we cannot entirely ignore context and history, either. A salient case, and one which I have a little experience of, is in comparing the Islam of India and the Islam of Pakistan. I really ought to wrap up now, but in short: India, despite a population of 172 million Muslims (the largest number of any single nation) has produced almost no jihadis fighting for ISIS or elsewhere, and has no internal agitation from Muslims that cannot be traced to political interference from Pakistan. Muslims in India leave peacefully beside their Hindu countrymen, often even worshipping in the same shrines or revering the same holy men (Sai Baba, for instance). In Pakistan, there is dangerous and increasing fundamentalism, due essentially to massive funding for jihadis by the U.S and Saudia Arabia during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These jihadis would cross the border and fight the Soviet Union for Islam; now, they fight the West and the secular authorities of their own country – still funded by Saudi Arabia. To get a sense of this, watch the amazing documentary ‘Among the Believers.’ You won’t regret it. But my point is that political realities will always, always have a huge effect on the way a religion functions, even if we cannot simply ignore the relative susceptibility of a particular religion to fundamentalism.

Well that post ended up much, much longer than I intended it to be, and I have barely addressed the main arguments. I hope that somebody bothers to slog through this and finds it in some way interesting or helpful!

I find this text incredibly poor and shallow and moreover it’s probably part of some sort of cliché “born-again” narrative which is supposed to inspire people to read it to join the author in the discovery of the one true faith. Moreover, “Islam” is not a person, and hence cannot slaughter anybody. Specific people are doing that and although they are probably happy to be taken for model Muslims, there is no shortage of other Muslims who would disagree. It’s frankly disheartening how well aligned the Islamophobic crew and the Jihadis are in their definition of what true Islam is supposed to be. Also, getting back to the “slaughter” bit, in Myanmar it’s undeniably Muslims who are getting slaughtered, so what is that supposed to be about? Rod, I just don’t get why you give such drivel your attention.

Siarlys, let us say for the sake of argument that I accept that the West in general and the US in particular is responsible for much of the Islamic unrest in the Arab world. Given that, why is Boko Haram so evil? What about the Muslim group in the Philippines? Or the atrocities committed against religious minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh? Except for Afghanistan after 9/11, we simply haven’t fought any of these peoples in a while, and yet Islam there is about as disagreeable as where we have fought. Strange, if the reason for their savagery was because of military action in a few countries of the Arab League.

As to the Crusades, I believe that the first was announced in 1095, just a few years shy of the 12th century. As the first Islamic attacks on Christian bases began in the first part of the 7th century, that’s almost half-a-millennium before Christendom took aggressive action, assuming the Crusades weren’t a sort of defensive action against Muslim depredations on pilgrims. OTOH, the last Crusader, IIRC, was out of the Middle East in 1298 – more than 700 years before the present. And yet we Westerners are supposed to hang our heads about what several popes decided to do, yet ignore the fact that the history of Islam’s aggression against Christianity was far more recent to the pontiffs then than the Crusades are to Islam now.

Christians should not engage in excessive consumption. However, you should not forget that wealth created by Christians has done plenty of good and funded all sorts of organizations. Abraham was conspicuously wealthy. Where was he commanded to stop, to give it all away, to adjust his possessions to make it more fair for those who had little? NOWHERE! You can laugh,cry, and put your head in your hands all you want, but I will place our excessive capitalist system as the best the world has ever seen. Even with its excess it has done more for and made life better for many millions. IF your concern is wealth inequality then you will support capitalism with all its problems over any other system. That is my point.

Thrice a Viking, I had to go look at my last couple of posts, because your reply did not appear to address anything I said. OK, its orthagonal, but I can see a very tenuous connection.

I don’t believe that “Christians” have been a unified block acting in a self-conscious and consistent strategy for even one hundred years at a time, let along 2000. Nor do I believe that of “Muslims.” History is a very diverse pageant.

The relevance of the Crusades is that there is nothing about the history and practice of Christianity that precludes vicious military oppression upon fellow Christians and adherents of other faiths… just as, there is nothing about Islam that precludes living in peace with one’s neighbors while practicing the rituals of one’s own faith. And vice versa of course.

I don’t believe that Daesh is directly and solely the product of the CIA and MI6. But have you ever hear of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? The powers or passions an agency calls into being or feeds and nurtures are not necessarily biddable once released into the world. Ronald Reagan’s freedom fighters were George Bush’s terrorists.

Why is Boko Haram so evil? Because they commit evil acts with little to no good to show for the alleged necessity. But, would you expect a pure creation of the CIA to be lacking in evil? It has a history of spawning evil, even if it also does some good work.

Re: As the first Islamic attacks on Christian bases began in the first part of the 7th century, that’s almost half-a-millennium before Christendom took aggressive action

Actually, no. Beginning in the 9th century the Byzantines had considerable success in pushing back the borders of the Caliphate. The Arabs were expelled from conquests in Crete and Sicily, Armenia had regained its independence, and the Byzantines had pushed south into Syria, retaking Antioch. And in Spain of course the Reconquista had begun. It was the unexpected Byzantine defeat by the Turks at Manzikert that upended everything and led to the plea for help from the West.

Excellent comment, and welcome to this comment section. As someone said above: more, please!

One minor nitpick: India has IIRC the third largest Muslim population, not the first (after Indonesia and Pakistan).

I think Hinduism is largely a religion of law as well, albeit no longer really an expansionist one (although it used to be expansitionist a thousand years ago): Manu was their Moses after all. But I entirely agree with your description of “religions of law” like Judaism and Islam versus “otherworldly” religions like Buddhism and Christianity.

I think your comparison between islam and communism is a decent one too (and I say this as someone quite sympathetic to many elements of communism). It’s not that Islam is “inherently” given to violence, the oppression of women and intolerance, but it’s certainly more easy to find explicit scriptural basis for these things than in it is in the New Testament, and somewhat harder to make arguments against them. As you hint at, the central event of Christianity isn’t the giving of a law code, it’s our being set free from the law, through the death of Christ. This has led to a lot of violence and civil conflict on its own (I think it’s no accident that the great revolts against monarchies in 16th century Germany, 17th century Britain, 18th century France, and then of course in 20th century Russia and Eastern Europe, all happened in Christian societies), but it is certainly a cardinal difference between Islam and Christianity.

You hit the nail on the head. Islam may be behind us by a few decades, but that is no guarantee that it will stay there.

Islam isn’t ‘behind us’ in any meaningful sense, that presumes that there’s a directional kind of progress inherent in history. I deny that there’s any such trend (it’s the liberal / Whiggish theory of history again). The first three centuries of Islam were clearly much bloodier than the first three centuries of Christianity, so it’s hard to argue that both religions are evolving along some kind of parallel track.

In any case, where is your evidence that trend lines in the Islamic world are positive? Fifty years ago, women in Iran didn’t have to wear ‘modest’ clothing. Burkas are becoming more common among Indian Muslim women, not less (albeit they are still very uncommon). Pakistanis in Britain are becoming more culturally backward as regards things like cousin marriage, not less so.

IF your concern is wealth inequality then you will support capitalism with all its problems over any other system. That is my point.

No, you won’t. The developed communist states had many economic problems, but one thing they did really well (well, after 1953 anyway) was achieve really low economic equality and keep everyone on more or less a similar level, at least as far as money went. The lowest Gini indices of any societies in modern history were in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and the Belarussian SSR (all in the 0.18 range or so, lower than any society today).

In Europe in general, the trend for the last millennium has been towards increasing economic inequality, with two periods of reversal: in the aftermath of the Black Death, and then during the course of the twentieth century (up until 1975 or so in the west, 1990 or so in the west, since then it’s been increasing again).

However, you should not forget that wealth created by Christians has done plenty of good and funded all sorts of organizations. Abraham was conspicuously wealthy. Where was he commanded to stop, to give it all away, to adjust his possessions to make it more fair for those who had little? NOWHERE!

This is the epitome of the silliness of proof-texting (leaving aside the fact there’s no evidence Abraham existed), but it gets even worse because you’re ignoring the loads of proof texts in the New Testament and in the writings of various Church Fathers that do, in fact, call for heavy wealth redistribution and that excoriate the existence of wealth and wealth inequalities in unambiguous terms.

As for capitalism, one might also note that Christianity has generally condemned usury, and you could extend the arguments for why they condemned usury to condemn other forms of income that don’t derive from productive work, as well. (Unfortunately in the early modern era most CHristian churches started gradually ignoring their own teaching on this matter: this is one of the few instances where Islam, which is chained to its own legal code, have a moral advantage).

For what it’s worth, I don’t want absolute economic inequalities, and I think some (small) differences in income, wages / salaries, and wealth are a good thing. Equality of incomes needs to be balancd against other goods, like the desire to reward effort and talent. That being said, I’d like such differentials to be quantitatively quite small, much closer to the communist ideal than to the capitalist one; I’d like to ensure they are small enough that they allow everyone a modicum of a moderately comfortable life, I’d like to ensure that incomes are tied to actual productive work rather than things like ownership of capital, and I’d like to provide useful and rewarding work for everyone (as well as ensure a duty to work). All that probably isn’t going to be achievable within capitalism and certainly not within the US form of capitalism.

Siarlys, while you may not have said it exactly as I interpreted it, you did say that the attacks on 9/11/2001 were “chickens come home to roost”, and this because of the CIA and MI6. That seems to me more than an orthogonal connection you’re making.

Now, while there may be more similarities between the *behavior* of Christians and Muslims than many of us would like to admit, the scriptural *justifications* for the same are quite different. The recently common phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” would likely receive very different answers than the same question applied to Mohammed. That’s why I agree with the commenter (I believe on this thread) who remarked that many self-professed devotees of Islam are good people precisely by being bad (that is, unfaithful) Muslims. As to Boko Haram, I’m sure they see their role quite differently than you do. They undoubtedly see themselves as soul-savers, all based on Koranic and Tadithic texts.

Jon F, I’ll concede the point. I should have been more careful and put a “Western” in front of Christendom. (Spain perhaps excluded.) However, even the Byzantine and Spanish actions seem rather defensive to me. After all, who initiated these wars of conquest, and who was trying to make the whole world bow to their religion? It wasn’t the Christians, nor, for that matter, the Zoroastrians. And the Ottomans did, in the 15th century, finally reach their goal of taking Constantinople, and a few centuries after that had conquered all the way to the gates of Vienna. I therefore stand by my assertion that Muslim complaints about the Crusades are hypocritical. The Cross did little if anything that the Crescent hadn’t done.

Hector, you said you “don’t want absolute economic inequalities”. (“Absolute” was in italics, I know, but I haven’t had much luck with putting those in on sites like this.) Did you mean to write that you don’t want “absolute equality”? Your text doesn’t make much sense to me as it stands, though that may be my problem of interpretation.

Rod, I am a little too late on this, but since I am onto it for a few days, I will do one more.

Annie,

I do not blame you for what happened to you. Unfortunately there is a very modern tendency to ‘sell’ the mysticism of Islam before (or even without) discussing the story of its worldly emergence, and the Book which came into this world alongside it, in detail.
There is no Islam if not for Qur’an and the Prophet’s life and tradition, and there is no Islamic mysticism before passing through them in a proper manner, analyzing them to the nth degree in order to grasp their spiritual synthesis. I am sure you know about the three stages of Islam, Iman and Ihsan; nobody considers that Ihsan is the first step. The same thing happened to me in another form too and I am still suffering from the consequences of the missteps that I made on the way.

In this context, I would understand if you said that you were not persuaded of the divine origins of Islam because, simply, the Prophet was not a pacifist, as he was not; I might have argued with you metaphysically about whether this is a necessity condition, but would not be offended about it. But, from there to depict him practically as a warmonger (be it by allusion or omission), I need to rectify a few points.

So, please excuse me in advance if I am somewhat polemical and perhaps sarcastic in tone in what follows- (I cannot going to edit what I wrote since I am running out of time). This is not about your experience with Islam or Qur’an, but about the lack of care in relating the realities with which I have been involved for so many years. And I will do it once and will stop, at least for a while. I will not follow up with any more polemical issues, this is just some exercise about the importance of the clarity in language: that it should reflect nuances or it says nothing.

“Christ died on a Cross forgiving his enemies and The Prophet spent the last decade of his life waging war in Mecca.”

These sentences are really surprising, or disappointing, from someone who claims to see the nuances and complexities. Your comparison is like saying: “Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by his enemies preaching peace and love; and Nelson Mandela spent 34 years waging war in Capetown”. Is this a good comparison? What can you deduce from this way of looking at things?

A little bit of background:

The Prophet did not ‘spend’ the last decade of his life ‘waging’ war ‘in’ Mecca. Mecca is the Prophet’s city of birth, where the Ka’ba shrine was and is located in Arabia. Meccans (and Quraysh) persecuted Muslims for 13 years, ending up with plans to kill and eliminate the Prophet. He migrated, along many Muslims, to another city, now called Medina, after the two non-Qurayshi tribes of Medina converted and gave him a pledge of support, and he became the head of that city-state by a pact which was agreed upon by all residents. Still, the Muslims in Mecca were persecuted and the properties of emigrating Meccan Muslims were confiscated. Only then, according to reports, a few verses of Qur’an were revealed in which it was said:

“Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged. And indeed, God is competent to give them victory.
[They are] those who have been evicted from their homes without right – only because they say, “Our Lord is God.” And were it not that God checks the people, some by means of others, there would have been demolished monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of God is much mentioned. And God will surely support those who support Him. Indeed, God is Powerful and Exalted in Might.” (22: 39-40)

A few major battles followed up in which not more than perhaps a few thousand people were involved and then when a chance for signing a peace treaty was presented, he accepted it under unfavorable conditions, which nevertheless allowed for peaceful spread of Islam in Arabia. And finally, when the Meccans broke the treaty, perhaps the one of the few bloodless conquest of human history took place, in which an army of 10,000 Muslims entered the city of Mecca and less than 10 people got killed.

So “waging” war is already a gross misrepresentation, and another misrepresentation is that he “spent” all that time at war. Oh it is amazing how many other things he did alongside, in acting as a judge and as the head of the growing city-state, as a Prophet, teaching a doctrine and guiding the believers spiritually, as husband of a wife and then of many wives*, living an ordinary modest life of his contemporaries, not that of a king or an ethereal being, as a father, consoler, as a grand-father, playing with his grandchildren, as a friend, mingling with his companions, and then praying and praying, day and night. From all those recorded reports, you could only read “spent 10 years waging wars”?

(Footnote *: I know. That’s unforgivable for a role model from a Christian point of view, but could nobody please not begin on this angle? The topic is: was the
Prophet a perpetual war wager or not?)

How about this, if you want to compare:

Christ died on the Cross forgiving his enemies, in a state of total weakness, and the Prophet forgave his enemies, who had done all but succeed in exterminating Muslims, from a position of power after the conquest of Mecca, when he had the full power to execute them all. The first position is certainly that of a holy man, but can it be compared to the second?

There are also more parallels, albeit more of theological nature. Are they at all leading to any conclusions? (No for me, but just for rhetorical purposes I mention them). For example:

By Islamic theology, the Prophet, so forgiving his enemies and allowing them to enter into the fold of Islam, saved their souls. By Christian theology, those enemies of Christ, who formally rejected him, will end up in Hell, forgiven or not. The Prophet will intercede in Mercy for anyone in whose favor God will allow Him to intercede in the day of judgement, Muslim or not, while on that day, by Christian theology, Christ will condemn and destroy his enemies, those “not bathed in the blood of the Lamb”, and will show no mercy.

********

The gist of what you say in the follow up is that “There are ‘texts’ in Islamic scriptures to which the Muslim criminals refer, while there are no such texts in Christian scriptures, and Christian criminals cannot justify their crimes. But, for 2000 years, the authority of the Church has been consistently justified by Christian texts and traditions, and the authority of the Church has been used to wage violence. The Albigensian crusade is an example. Take as another example, in current times, as another commenter already mentioned, the abuse of the New Testament by distorting the meaning of ‘love’, which is now meaning everything and nothing, and has become a mean to justification of any lax behavior or thought, or other abuses of which, as a liberal, you are probably well convinced.

However, there is another problem here too, that of clarity and attention to details, and a clarification regarding ‘pacifism’.

“The Prophet says and does certain things and those things have been followed through on by many. It is a strain of thought present in the beginning and that thought has consequences.”

“Certain things”? “A strain” of thought? Followed by “many”? What and who, exactly? Any details please?

So Nelson Mandela initiated an armed struggle in South Africa against the Apartheid regime, and as a “consequence” 6 innocent Baton Rouge police officers got killed by armed black militants last year. That was because of “certain things” that Mandela said, or a “strain of thought” present in his thoughts, perhaps?

Question is: Do you hold any declared position except for one of “absolute pacifism” as unholy and responsible for all the crimes committed by all?

“Consequences”? Yes, I know this one. The underlying assumption is that human beings are machines programmed by softwares, i.e. religions. See, these faithful good Muslims: they read “kill them wherever you find them” in their holy texts. This initiates a “thought process” in their brains, and moves them to to go out of the mosque and kill a few of “them”, which, by the way, are usually Muslims (so on their way out they had to excommunicate “them” unilaterally). There is no other background to that, the perpetrators did not have a free will to act or not on their intelligence, to follow or not their base passions as opposed to patiently read the previous or next verse or check their own asinine understanding with an elder; the poor guys are innocent, [the grossly misunderstood] ‘texts’ are the problem. People are devoid of free will and choice, and have to follow blindly the immediate literal sense of what is in their own scriptures. Human societies must be engineered by “good texts”, and only the human beings will become innocent as angels.

That’s Kant’s idea:

‘The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.”‘

and there is no joy or free will in this state, as in the moralistic liberal one.

I don’t deny that texts have meanings. Mein Kampf had one meaning and it was extremely nefarious.
The Qur’an is an infinitely more complex text, but those “violent” meanings to which you are implying it alludes
are not among its logically possible meanings. One just needs to treat it gently and with care, with attention to
details,- and even if we forget all about the historical context and traditional complex exegetical methods, the linguistic, metaphysical and spiritual commentaries-, just looking at the whole translated text as its own context is almost enough.
I know that you read it twice, but me too, and I did not find what you claim to be part of it. Unfortunately, since you do not provide any details, I cannot address them.

“Since Monday, Islamic militants have bombed, murdered, and waged war in Marawi, Manchester, Bosaso, Mogadishu, Jakarta, and Kenya. Western violence in the ME, which I condemn, is not the common denominator here. Context is certainly something, but ideology plays a role too.”

Yes, nobody denied that there is an ideology there involved; but which ideology? Islam, or “SLEIMY”, the “Stupid Literalism of Enraged Identity Muslim Youth”? I could also change it to “Stupid Liberalism of Enraged Identity Muslim Youth”, considering the Liberties they take with the text. Moreover, the enraged Muslim jihadist youth, say in Philippines, are reacting to the Western violence in ME after identifying with the victim as an oppressed Muslim. Yes, this is maybe a distorted logic, but what part of their logic is not. Islam is a universal religion, and therefore its modern deviation, SLEIMY, is a global ideology. It is the violence in point X which is begetting violence in point Y, through the filter of this deviated globalist ideology.

“As I said and find myself having to repeat: Of course it is not all or most Muslims. But lesser jihad is not a mysterious alien lone wolf that just pops up out of the blue. It is there from the beginning.”

That’s again the question about pacifism. [Lesser] Jihad is a true reality of legal category, but at its highest illiberal incarnation, it was considered only legitimate as the state-approved war against another state with which there was no treaty and which persecuted Muslims (i.e., in the pre-modern context, by killing them), and many jurists nowadays believe that passed the foundational times, this protective form” is no more a valid form of jihad and so only survives the “self-defense” type, and again the latter is considered legitimate by some only if it is organized by the community and is not done through individual initiative.

No individual Muslim is justified in the logic of Islam to launch jihad arbitrarily just because he read half of a verse in the Qur’an. Even if he reads only a translation of Qur’an, checking out how some verses comment on others, he will realize that this is not what the Book is commanding. Let alone arbitrarily declaring by whim other Muslims apostates and shedding their blood. One can have a case by case historical discussion about Muslim wars of the past, but equating SLEIMic jihadism with Islamic legal category of jihad is like equating dogs and hot dogs. Both are dogs, no?

Bottom line: If you feel that the mere existence of a theory of ‘just war’ causes the ‘unjust wars’ (as practically all unjust wars have been justified such), please clarify your position. Do you hold it true that no legitimate defense, no ‘just war’ could have taken place in history, in any shape or manner? That the only holy option was an absolute pacifism, and whoever theorizes (or theorized in the past) the just wars shares (or shared) in the responsibility for the unjust ones as a criminal? Only then you would be consistent to some extent, and then only if you can uphold that principle to the end.